>Pete,
>The very things that makes Macintosh's good are what makes them bad!
>That of course is the limited distribution and closed operating
>system. If you
>don't have many after market options to add, it is easy to make the
>thing more stable. ANd the cost if a small production product will
>always be
>higher than one that is mass produced.
First of all Joe, this discussion gets a little more complicated
nowadays with the release of Apple's all-new Mac OS X (which I will
NOT be upgrading to any time soon). This new OS is 'open' unlike the
previous OS, so perhaps this will make OS X more inviting to
virus-writers. OS X is an ENTIRELY different animal from the Mac OS
that has been developed over the last 17 years.
That being said, I think many people (including you, I dare say)
continue to suffer from a delusion of sorts about availability (or
lack thereof) of software for Macintosh and the ability to add
peripherals and to 'soup up' your system either by installing
hardware upgrades or by adding software-based features.
Now I'll grant you that, as an example, there is no Autocad version
for the Mac OS, but by and large every substantial piece of software
that the average user is likely to have on his/her PC is available
for the Mac platform. If it's not, there's another software package
for the Mac that'll do the same thing. The only hole in this
statement is game software. I understand that while there are
numerous games available for the Mac, the number of games available
for the PC is just plain staggering. I have no doubt that for
extremely specialized software such as Autocad and others,
availability on the Mac drops VERY quickly, if not instantly.
(However, there are a number of good CAD packages available for the
Mac, although none of them would compete with Autocad) But again,
for the average user there is absolutely no reason why software
availability (or lack thereof) should prevent that user from buying a
Mac. With the possible exception of games, it simply is not an issue.
You also made a comment about adding 'after-market' options, implying
that somehow this is difficult to do on a Mac or that there isn't
much available for the Mac in that genre. But while there may be
more of this kind of stuff available for the PC, there's absolutely
no shortage of add-on extensions and control panels for the Mac. You
can tweak your Mac to no end and add endless gadgets and gizmos to
your OS that, as you correctly state, make the machine less and less
stable. You can create or download custom icons, desktop pics,
appearance themes, sound sets and a whole host of other system-level
enhancements. I bought a joystick, a mouse and speakers that are for
a PC. The drivers that'll run the joystick on a Mac are built right
into the Mac OS, so I just plugged it in and it worked. The DIMM
modules are interchangeable from Mac to PC. The hard drives are
cross-platform (of course, you format a Mac hard drive different than
a PC hard drive, but the hardware is the same). I bought a 40 gig
hard drive and installed it in 5 minutes. Peripherals like my
CD-burner, external hard drive and SCSI Zip drive always work, and
they were all plug-and-play. Piece of cake.
The most significant problem Apple has, and you eluded to this, is
cost. They are more expensive, in general, than PCs. However, Apple
has become far more competitive in recent years than they have been
in the past and they are still coming down. Besides that, you get
what you pay for.
>Microsoft is a target of viruses because it is the most common. So
>targeting a Microsoft product will cause the most damage.
Certainly, as Apple gains in market share the Mac platform will
become more attractive to virus writers. So in that vain, PLEASE
don't go out and buy a Mac!
Best regards, and happy computing!
--
Pete Chadwell
1973 TR6
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